CHAPTER 20 | 1950s – Boom Times Again
1951 PENFOLDS BIN 1 GRANGE HERMITAGE South Australia
The 1951 Penfolds Grange Hermitage was an experimental wine that was never released to the public. Max Schubert sourced shiraz grapes from the Grange Vineyard at Magill and from the privately owned Honeypot Vineyard, planted in 1920 by Samuel Wynn, the founder of Wynn’s Coonawarra Estate, just south of Adelaide, at Morphett Vale. He said, ‘I had already observed that both vineyards produced wines of distinctive varietal flavour and character with a great depth of colour and body weight, and felt that by producing them together, the outstanding characteristics of both vineyards would result in an improved all- round wine eminently suitable for my purpose’. While the 1951 vintage is perhaps the least among those of the 1950s, it represents the inception of an Australian fine wine aesthetic. The experimental Granges are a major body of achievement in the art and science of wine, arguably the Australian wine industry’s
equivalent to the chronometer, or powered flight. There are probably around 40 surviving bottles of 1951 Grange in circulation. The high- shouldered glass-blown Bordeaux bottle is unique to this vintage. The wine was barely known in the outside world, and only an inner sanctum of Penfolds employees was aware of its existence until around the early 1980s when the museum stocks were raided by the new corporate owners. But these rare bottles are equivalent to penny black stamps. Auction values bounce around, but a bottle, recorked and certified by Max Schubert in 1988, achieved a record price of $142,131 in July 2021.
Penfolds Bin 1 Grange Hermitage, 1951.
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